Interview washup / post mortum

I was invited to interview at a consultancy company in nearby Lund before I went away for my brother's wedding, as I'd begun to suspect, they informed me they can't offer me a position at the moment.

Yesterday I rang my interviewer to find out if they were still interested, or if they weren't, to see if they would offer me some feedback. During the telephone call my interviewer told me three or four times how interesting my CV was and how they wanted to keep my details in case an appropriate project came up. Now this may be just letting me down gently, but I think the interviewer was being candid.

I have decided to be upbeat about both the interview and the experience and avoid my usual cynical and negative outlook and have taken the following positives:

1. I managed to conduct a proportion of the interview in Swedish, I understood everything my interviewer asked and only really had to switch to English when I answered questions about the technical nature of software development projects I'd worked on over the last few years.

2. I think I've found a target market for my services: large IT consultancies. I seem to have a nice mix of skills (coding, requirements gathering, systems analysis, team management, project management) and just the sort of service they like to pimp out to companies who don't have those readily available to them.

3. It was my first interview in Sweden so I had no idea what to expect. It was very informal and much more along the lines of an informal chat about my career history and I guess to see if my personality would fit in with the people they have working there already.

I described the situation to a friend at my SFI course today, and she put it into perspective for me. She simply said how sometimes certain things are meant to be, and others aren't. Maybe it wasn't the right opportunity for me and a better one would come along soon. I've decided my friend's positive outlook is the best approach.

On the language front, I really felt on top of things today, lots of flowing Swedish and good conversations, and the synapse were firing today. I also got lots of compliments on the progress I've made so far which I really appreciated and built me up a bit.